the thing with feathers
by EleanorRigbee
Summary: Hope is the thing with feathers and Dean hasn’t seen it in a while.


**Disclaimer: Don't own the boys**

A/N: A brother piece, PoV goes back and forth. Warnings for some bad language. Title comes from a poem by Emily Dickenson. Drop me a review and let me know what you think.

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Hope is the thing with feathers and Dean hasn't seen it in a while.

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He's going to buy a house. One day, when this is over—because there's some part of him that refuses to think that it won't be—he's going to buy a house, and settle in and make his life. A fucking roof and walls, real rooms and beds and showers with good waterworks, none of that half hearted pressure and lukewarm-at-best water that most of their crumby motels offer. He doesn't tell Sam, not ever, because he's gotten the lasting impression that he's brother has stopped believing in an end, and the last thing he needs is Sam's bright eyes and unsteady mouth and that damn logic of his, crazy-brooding-emo-shit- reality that cuts into the any of the soft spots Dean might have left.

Because Sam would be quick to point out that even if they ever got the thing that killed their mother—and Jess and their father, the thing that almost killed Dean, the thing that has marked Sammy—Dean would never stop. 'You love the hunt.' He would say, 'and you like your guns and the road and this damn car too much to give it up for anything.' And maybe, if Sammy were really in tune with his dark side, he'd remind Dean that he's wanted by the feds.

So Dean keeps it all to himself, because imagining Sammy's words is one thing but hearing them would be another, and the last thing Dean needs right now is another rain cloud on his shitty little parade.

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Dad broke Dean.

He's not talking about the possession and Dad's yellow eyes and the sound of Dean's bones breaking, one by one—clean snaps that tore and scratched and ached inside Sam's own chest—and the sight of his brother's blood spilling and blotting and staining everything.

There's probably something wrong with that, too, the fact that that one completely fucked moment isn't the stand-out piece in the collection of evidence Sam's taken to storing under the label 'How Dad ruined Dean'. It's not the training or the guns or the lectures on werewolves and water sprites that should have been talks about homework and football or girls. No, that was all set up. Dad broke Dean the same way he broke Sam, by keep his secrets and telling them one thing and one thing only, then turning around on them and telling them—telling Dean, singular, alone—something else entirely.

Then he died.

That was all there was to the story, boys and girls, to the amazing show John Winchester had spent their entire lives preparing them for. Telling Dean he'd have to save him or kill him (God, how he wishes Dad would have removed the conjunction and put the two ideas together, connected them for Dean in a way Sam's been unable to) and then dying himself without telling Sam a thing. Putting it all instead on the broken shoulders of his first born and slipping into the afterlife.

John was a bastard like that.

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He's tired.

Like he-could-sleep-until-the-devil-knocks-down-the-door tired, but it's not the best of sayings, because in his line of work it could happen.

He tried explaining it to Sam, tried to say he wanted more, wanted less, wanted peace. He tried to tell Sam that he wanted to slow down and live a little because something inside of him was telling him the end of this thing was coming and he couldn't see anything after. But Sam didn't listen (well, he listened but he didn't understand, didn't understand all the words Dean wasn't saying underneath the ones he spoke) and in the end he just pushed harder, pushed and pushed until Dean was propped up on the excuses and the guilt and nothing more.

_This is it_, he thinks later, sitting stiffly in the drivers seat, Sam coming in and out of sleep besides him, _this is why I'd stop_.

He tries to memorize it, the weariness that sinks deeper and deeper inside him, tries to find the words to describe it, form his own logic. Because a man could live for love and purpose and sacrifice, he could push on. But something he had to stop because the weariness got too much, made love strained and purpose could be obsolete and sacrifice selfish. So he had to stop and change course so he won't get tired of living.

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Dean gives too much and Sam takes without reciprocating and maybe it's his own fault that his brother's cracks are starting to show.

Because Sam is starting to think he took too much from his brother in their years, made him grow up before his time almost as much as the fire (because Sam's first memories are of crappy motels and the tinkering of metal and the starkness of salt lines on stained carpets and _Dean_, first sight of the morning, last voice heard at night).

Without Dean the risk of falling is greater, the dark is more immense, less discernable, and Sam's soul is a little bit closer to hell, or whatever it is that's supposed to consume him (so, in the end, he is selfish even in this, saving Dean to save himself).

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Sam wants him to be better so he is.

Not really, but then, neither of them is really anything other than screwed, so Dean can live with the deception.

It's hard, though, to hope when all that's holding him up is his brother's desperation and the whispers in his mind and the feeling, sick and twisted and inescapable, that the end won't be in their favor.

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**End**


End file.
